Group items tagged

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

We use the term civic media, rather than citizen journalism: civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students are experimenting with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center amplifies the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

“participatory culture”

The altered roles of the teacher and the student substantially change teaching itself. Learning with digital media isn’t about giving our well-worn teaching practices a hip appearance; it is, more fundamentally, about exploring radically new approaches to instruction. The future of learning will not be determined by tools but by the re-organization of power relationships and institutional protocols. Digital media, however, can play a positive role in this process of transformation.

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century, described good contemporary teachers as learning experts, mentors, motivators, technology integrators, and diagnosticians.

The most burning problem for digital learning is technological obsolescence and the attendant need to learn and readapt to new technological milieus and cycles of transformation. Openness, flexibility, playfulness, persistence, and the ability to work well with others on-the-fly are at the heart of an attitude that allows learners to cope with the unrelenting velocity of technological change in the 21st century. Digital media fluency also requires an understanding of the moment when technological interfaces hinder learning and become distracting.

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.

Finally, the AP also offers some basic rules of thumb for how social media should and shouldn’t be used by journalists, with a focus on making sure they continue to confirm sources and information they find on blogs, tweets and other forms of social media.

Welcome to the website for The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age. The goal of this project: to help ensure that all Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information that will enable them to enrich their families, communities and democracy.

The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments.

“My Ohio State colleagues took the initiative last November to convene a community conversation to discuss the implications of the report for Columbus. They could not get a single mainstream media news outlet (print or broadcast) to participate—although public and alternative media were well represented…”

“What would it be like to organize an entire college or university education around the idea of journalism? I am not talking here about what we think of as vocational journalism education. The idea is not to make everyone a professional editor or reporter. I am talking, instead, about conceiving an entire program of liberal education that takes as its central theme the idea that the new media phenomenon is potentially making everyone a journalist.

I’ve long believed that basic journalism training would benefit everyone, and that journalistic assignments could start as early as elementary school. Shane points out that his vision of journalism-centered higher education could help solve three major social problems: The shortfall in local news production around the country. The well-documented deficiency in college student writing. Low civic literacy: Americans’ generally poor knowledge about how social institutions work, and who makes the policy decisions that affect their lives. Shane also observed that involving students in local journalism “wins the educational trifecta”: Students would tackle meaningful and intellectually challenging issues. Students enjoy dealing with such issues. Students would develop marketable skills while also learning to function effectively as citizens.

Still skeptic about social media, watch this new video” with mind blowing stats

The top editor of The Times, Russ Stanton, and several of his deputies vigorously opposed the ad before it was published, but they were overruled by the paper’s business executives, according to people with direct knowledge of the dispute,

Mr. Conroy noted that however unorthodox the ad may be for print, it mirrors a common practice online of having an ad cover part or all of a Web site’s home page for a few seconds.

“It’s taking a concept that we normally apply to new media and reimagining it to a concept in a newspaper,”

I was confronted with the fact that traditional media was rarely publishing, let alone commissioning, long-form visual journalism. I saw the dearth of assignments as an opportunity that would force me to find different, and potentially more personally fulfilling, ways to reach an audience.

"I figured that if my primary goal was not to publish in traditional print media, then I should take on projects that were larger and demanded a broader platform. I began to investigate ways to finance those projects and avenues to distribute them. I began to look for grants to produce the work, but was equally interested in figuring out how to reach an audience outside of traditional media outlets in a way that could still have a significant impact.

I'm Phil Coomes, picture editor and photographer for the BBC News website. This is my blog where I'll be exploring the world of photojournalism, photos in the news and BBC News' use of photographs, including those by our readers.

relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day

Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.

As The Times and its Sunday sibling challenge the Internet orthodoxy that readers will refuse to pay for general news online, some of the conventions of newspaper Web design are already tumbling. Freed from the imperative to generate clicks and to lure search engines, The Times and Sunday Times have taken a novel, reader-focused approach that minimizes distractions.

advertisers are most interested in audiences who actually care about what they read or watch, rather than the casual Web surfers.

The new Sunday Times site is particularly striking visually, with a heavy emphasis on photography. Clicking on an article brings it up in a separate box, with everything else on the page shrouded in a dark gray screen that makes for easier reading.

in the current digital news ecosystem, having “week” in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.

in a publishing landscape filled with the lame and infirm, weeklies are the most profoundly challenged. A weekly schedule, with its tight turnarounds and frenzied production, is costly as a matter of course. Monthlies can still do step-backs for readers who don’t expect to see what happened five minutes ago, and daily newspapers have co-opted the newsweekly formula to build in real-time analysis.

It is axiomatic that in the current epoch, it is much less cost-intensive to build out a new brand than to try to walk back the cat on a legacy business.

"This was not [built as a] marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building environment."

intersection between digital and physical

"The experiences you have online can translate to rich offline experiences."

Voices Beyond Walls is a participatory media initiative that supports creative expression and human rights advocacy among impoverished youth through digital storytelling workshops, new media production, and global dissemination of their work.

UPC television (Upper Pinellas County) began in 1987, and has since grown to produce an award-winning daily 10-minute news show, which had to get cut back to 5 minutes this year due to school schedule changes. Special projects have included a nationally broadcast Devil Rays game, commercial videos, and numerous competition pieces. The most involved students have the opportunity to participate in field trips to major competitions and conventions around the nation. The experience UPC offers is as good as-if not better than- many college programs.